Mirrors (6 page)

Maui, founder of the Polynesian Islands, was born half man, half god, like Gilgamesh.

His divine half obliged the sun, always in a great hurry, to walk slowly across the sky. And with a fishhook he caught the islands of New Zealand, Hawaii, Tahiti, raised them one after another from the bottom of the sea, and placed them where they now lie.

But his human half sentenced him to death. Maui knew it, and his feats did not help him forget it.

In search of Hine, the goddess of death, he traveled to the underworld.

And there he found her: immense, asleep in the mist. She looked like a temple. Her raised knees formed an arch over the hidden door to her body.

To achieve immortality, he would have to go right inside death, travel all the way through her, and exit by her mouth.

At the door, a great half-open slit, Maui let fall his clothes and his weapons. Naked, in he went, and bit by bit he slithered along the path of moist and burning darkness that his progress disclosed in the depths of the goddess.

Halfway through the journey, the birds sang and she awoke and felt Maui excavating her innards.

And she closed the passage and never let him out.

BORN OF TEARS

Before Egypt was Egypt, the sun created the sky and the birds that fly through it. He created the Nile and the fish that swim in it. And he painted its black banks green with the teeming life of plants and animals.

Then the sun, maker of life, sat back to contemplate his work.

The sun felt the deep breathing of the newborn world as it opened before his eyes and he heard the first voices.

Such tremendous beauty hurt.

The sun’s tears fell to earth and made mud.

And from that mud came people.

NILE

The Nile obeyed the Pharaoh. It was he who opened the way for the floods that year by year ensured Egypt’s astonishing fertility. After death too: when the first ray of sun filtered through the grate on Pharaoh’s tomb and lit up his face, everyone knew the earth would offer three harvests.

Thus it was.

Not anymore.

Of the seven arms of the delta only two remain, and of the holy cycles of fertility, which are no longer holy or cycles, all that remains are the ancient hymns of praise for the longest river:

Thou quenchest the thirst of the flocks.
Thou drinkest the tears of all eyes.
Rise up Nile, may thy voice resound!
May thy voice be heard!

STONE THAT SPEAKS

When Napoleon invaded Egypt, one of his soldiers found on the banks of the Nile a great black stone entirely engraved with symbols.

They called it Rosetta.

Jean François Champollion, a student of dead languages, spent his youth going round and round that stone.

Rosetta spoke three languages. Two had been deciphered. Not the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The writing of the creators of the pyramids remained an enigma. A scripture much commented upon: Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus, and Horapollo all pretended to translate it, making it up as they went along, as did the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who published four tomes of nonsense. All of them believed hieroglyphs were a system of symbolic images, and the meanings varied according to the fantasy of each translator.

Mute symbols or deaf men? For years and years, Champollion peppered the Rosetta Stone with questions, and received only obstinate silence in response. The poor fellow was wasting away from hunger and discouragement when one day he thought of a possibility that had occurred to no one before: suppose the hieroglyphs were sounds as well as symbols? Suppose they were something like the letters of an alphabet?

That day the tombs opened and the dead kingdom spoke.

WRITING, NO

Some five thousand years before Champollion, the god Thoth traveled to Thebes and offered King Thamus of Egypt the art of writing. He explained hieroglyphs and said that writing was the best remedy for poor memory and feeble knowledge.

The king refused the gift: “Memory? Knowledge? This invention will encourage forgetting. Knowledge resides in truth, not in its appearance. One cannot remember with the memory of another. Men will record, but they won’t recall. They will repeat, but they will not live. They will learn of many things, but they won’t understand a thing.”

WRITING, YES

Ganesha is stout, thanks to his love of candy, and he has the ears and trunk of an elephant. But he writes with human hands.

He is the master of initiations, the one who helps people begin their work. Without him, nothing in India would ever get under way. In the art of writing as in everything else, the first step is what counts. Any beginning is a grand moment in life, so Ganesha teaches, and the first words of a letter or a book are as fundamental as the first bricks of a house or a temple.

OSIRIS

Egyptian scripture tells us the story of the god Osiris and his sister Isis.

Osiris was murdered in one of those family quarrels that occur frequently on earth and in the heavens, then he was quartered and scattered in the depths of the Nile.

Isis, his sister and lover, dove down and collected the pieces. One by one, she joined his parts with seams of clay, and out of clay she modeled whatever was missing. When the body was complete, she lay him down on the bank of the river.

That clay, stirred and mixed by the Nile, contained grains of barley and seeds of other plants.

The sprouting body of Osiris stood up and walked.

ISIS

Like Osiris, Isis was privy to the mysteries of perpetual birth. We know her image: a mother goddess breastfeeding her son Horus, as the Virgin Mary suckled Jesus much later on. But Isis was never what we might call a virgin. She began making love to Osiris when they were growing together inside their mother’s womb. And she practiced the world’s oldest profession for ten years in the city of Tyre.

In the thousands of years that followed, Isis traveled the world resuscitating whores, slaves, and others among the damned.

In Rome, she founded temples for the poor alongside bordellos. The temples were razed by imperial order, their priests crucified, but like stubborn mules they came back to life again and again.

And when Emperor Justinian’s soldiers demolished the sanctuary of Isis on the island of Philae in the Nile, and built the very Catholic church of Saint Stephen on the ruins, Isis’s pilgrims continued paying homage to their errant goddess at the Christian altar.

SAD KING